Taxing the Pandemic!

Private business is not the only sector that will be affected through this Covid-19 saga. All of our states counties and municipalities will also be affected. Right now, we are seeing a decrease in bed taxes, sales tax, and many others. The taxes are usually mandated by state and localities and fund many programs from education, after school to beautification programs. In Martin County for instance, the bed tax helps fund promotion of the county, sports promotion, capital projects, and beach/inlet maintenance. These are all great things until good times come to a halt, this is when we find out if the people we entrusted our public tax dollars were wise enough to save for a rainy day.

In Florida, we do not rely on state income tax which is a great thing for us as residents, and one of the reasons people retire with us. However, this also means we rely on our sales tax heavily which is paid by all living or visiting in Florida. This is where we might start seeing some problems in the near future. Miami officials are predicting a project deficit of $21 million due to corona virus. This only becomes an issue if the same officials predicting this did not include a rainy-day budget item. So far there are many areas across the country which are now calling for increases in taxes due to these issues. This is proof the public leaders in those areas may have failed their residents. At this point, we have not heard of these calls for tax hikes in FL yet. We hope it stays that way…

Either way, this is something as residents of FL we should all keep our eyes on since this will affect all of us. “NO MORE TAXES” is definitely something we can all agree on even if we don’t agree on masks because as we all know, once taxes increase, they NEVER decrease… NO MORE masks, I mean TAXES! NO MORE TAXES!! NO MORE TAXES!!